Bay Area Barks User Experience: Design through Discovery – Chapter 5

Now we come to my favorite part of the UX/UI process – design! In the UX Apprentice it states that “Discovery and Strategy only account for 20% of the process, the bulk of your time will be spent prototyping, testing and refining designs.”

I’ll add to this by stating that any NEW feature, even if it’s a “small one”, must be prototyped and tested. Until your users can get their hands on a clickable prototype or mockup to test the new feature – they won’t understand how it works – period.

Thankfully, great prototyping tools like Balsamiq or Sketch, make this task easier but mockups can be made using any tool that can export a linked document.

My favorite example of using KeyNote as a prototyping tool was a talk given at the 2014 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference titled “Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It” . This talk also encouraged me to re-focus on User Experience and User Interface design to build consensus between developers and UI/UX teams.